Posted
by
EditorDavid
on Sunday November 27, 2016 @01:34PM
from the shades-of-Isaac-Asimov dept.

"No Man's Sky changed a great deal this morning, getting new modes and a ton of gameplay tweaks thanks to update 1.1, the largest one yet," reports Kotaku. Calling it "the first of many free updates," the game's developers introduced a new Minecraft-style Creative Mode which "allows players to explore the universe without limits, and build a huge base," plus a tougher Survival Mode, "creating a much more challenging endurance experience." The Next Web calls it "features that really should have been in the game from Day One."
Now, when you stumble upon a desolate outpost, you can build your own base on it, which can be upgraded with new housing, hydroponics, research, and storage buildings. If all goes well, you'll start to attract alien settlers who bring their own skills to your new society. As your stockpiles of resources begin to swell, you'll want to schlep them across the galaxy to other bases and trade terminals. Which is where freighters come in... Oh, and did I mention you can now stack items five times per inventory slot, meaning you can carry more stuff? Handy.
"The discussion around No Man's Sky since release has been intense and dramatic," Hello Games announced Friday, describing update 1.1 as "putting in place a foundation for things to come... the first small step in a longer journey." Hello Games founder Sean Murray tweeted "We're getting better as quickly as we can for the players who invested in us," adding "Thank you for sticking with us." At 2 a.m. this morning, he tweeted "If you could have lived our lives over the last months, you'd know how meaningful this is," adding "Here's the update..."

One of the best games ever. I actually got hold of Alec Kercso in the late 90s and had a short discussion with him about Starflight, he said while developing it he had a great feeling of being a small ship in a huge universe, something no other game that I know of has really done since. In fact Minecraft is the only other game I can think of that I've played where you can really feel lost and scared in a big place.

Don't worry, it's not just you. Slashdot seems to be filled with mods anxious to silence those they disagree with.

For what it's worth, I do happen to agree with you about No Man's Sky. Too little, too late. Hello Games have already been exposed as liars. And the gameplay is still going to be shallow and repetitive. A few extra features won't make up for that. I was really excited about the game too, as I'm definitely an "explorer" type gamer.

I was really excited about the game too, as I'm definitely an "explorer" type gamer.

Me too! That's my very favorite thing to do in a video game, explore space. But if it's only interesting once (and not all that interesting at that) then there are old games which accomplish that which I can play for five bucks.

And that was the problem - they made there be absolutely no reason to explore. All resources were available everywhere, as were all types of buildings in the game. It takes away all incentive to explore, except for aesthetics. Which is great, except that since all of the creatures and plants are made of premade assets, and the terrain is just standard diamond-square fractal terrain with a handful of primitive generators / modifier functions, you run through all of the variation that the universe has to

If they had done proper playtesting and player feedback, they could have made a far better game. There was so much potential. Some things that could have been done to make it better were hard, but a lot of them really weren't.

Here's what I think happened: they made all kinds of claims about what they could do, and got someone at Sony's attention. They showed Sony an above-average demo and Sony said "sure, but we want it ready before the holidays, so you can get it out and see what breaks and get it fixed." And so they committed to a grossly overly ambitious timescale, and found out along the way that some of the things they had planned were going to be a lot more difficult than they thought. And since they're just teeny, tiny li

That might be a pretty good insight into whats gone wrong here. Hello games gets picked up by a big publisher. big publisher forces them to release game before its ready. nobody wins.

I kind of feel sad for hello games. The boss promised what the team could not deliver. Its not the teams fault, but they are not exempt from the rivers of shit that flowed forth. I've been in death march projects before from bosses who can't keep their mouth shut and wont focus on whats possible rather than a fantasy of it. Its

Lol, it's completely relevant, since as a distributor, Sony has very little to do with the game's development. So they wouldn't have the legal power you claim they have.

What? Who told you that, and why are you repeating what they said? Sony has as much to do with the game's development as they have managed to secure for themselves contractually. There are no laws which apply here, contract law aside. The contract can place any obligations on Hello Games which are not themselves illegal. That can certainly include an obligation to provide additional support and development. If you disagree, please explain in detail why you think it's impossible to Sony to have overlawyered

I think the words you're looking for here are "my argument", not "my self". At least, so I hope.

on the fact that Sony was not the publisher nor producer, and the fact that both Hello Games and Sony have publicly stated that Sony wasn't involved in development, and that HG was offered financial/people resources but refused them.

All of which continues to be irrelevant, and not support your point. My point is that Sony would surely want not to be blindsided by the game being abandoned when development is not complete, and was in a financial position to demand that Hello Games commit to maintaining it. You have nothing at all to support your point, not even logic.

I think it's very difficult to create a randomly generated world or universe that's actually interesting to explore, because human brains are extremely good at recognizing patterns, and people start seeing those same patterns everywhere you go in that universe. The randomly generated universe created an excellent setting for a game, but I don't think that by itself was meaty enough as a game mechanic to keep people satisfied.

You can contrast this experience with Diablo I & II, where exploring a randomly

Bummer. The Space Quest game was one I was interested in but missed (long time fan, SQ4 is dear to me) and I recently followed up on it since I was curious if it was released yet and I was shocked to learn that one of the original guys is taking care of a ill parent. I'm not excusing the issue, it just sheds some light on the delay. Looks like I'll be holding off another year until the price drops:D

The news here is that a minuscule percentage of the original supposed functionality is a "new" feature.

What "original supposed functionality"? Seriously.

Based on following this (I haven't played it), the hype/mistaken expectations seems to have all been fan driven, and (admittedly anecdotal), I've read people who said that the original E3 videos aren't more off from the end result than tons of other projects. (The most recent one I read was yesterday on the Giant Bomb Facebook group.)

The real story here is that Hello Games still think they haven't burnt all their karma and their house down.

It take skill to screw up as royally as they did. Their name is forever tainted. The story here is that they still exist. I would have thought they dissolved and changed their name before daring to show themselves again.

Just wait until Star Citizen releases. I've seen people on the forums who have spent nearly $1,000 (yes, one thousand real world US dollars) backing that game to get one of the capital ships at launch. I think only one or two of the low-end capital ships (yachts?) are playable so far, supposedly another one is coming in December with 2.6. But the single-player game, Squadron 42, was already supposed to be out and now we're just hoping we'll get a few missions come January.

After a disaster like NMS, I would prefer a game developer to try to make things right, like Hello Games are doing, by releasing free content and enhancing the game, rather than simply disappearing.

But maybe I'm not so bitter about them because I didn't buy their game. I was very interested, but you could smell the hype from a mile away. And those promotional videos, you could easily tell that they were scripted and not real in-game material. So I decided to wait and see.

I care, a little. Everyone who didn't foolishly pre-purchse the game (you know, like you're never supposed to do) probably has some interest in whether and when it will turn into something worth playing.

It seems that the devs are adding back previously cut features and code to NMS. A lot of what was hyped about the game had to exist in one form or another at some point. I've never played the game, and avoided purchasing it based on all the negative feedback. If Hello Games had been more upfront with the missing features at launch, and then had some sort of roll out schedule, things might have been better. The deal with Sony may not have been a great idea.

Don't ever believe the hype and don't always trust reviews. NMS is actually quite a fun and interesting game. For a few hours anyway then it tends to get a tad monotonous. Is it worth 60 bucks? No even on a good day. Is it worth playing? Very much so

i don't even play games, but after all the negativity and hate they received... they actually dug in and made an update nobody expected to have came. i for one am glad to see them try to fix their mistakes. other game makers could learn from this because many games ship and the company takes the $ and runs, never even trying to make their customers happy. after all the hate they received, they deserve a little respect for attempting to make it right.

All the pre-launch publicity can be viewed as a massive exercise in building hype without actually committing to much at all. The language used irks me a lot as well, as it's bordering schizophrenia, but that's probably the point of it; they don't want to commit to anything, but make people think that's what they're getting. A case in point was the commonly asked question of whether you will see some other player... The answer was always that the universe is so large that statistically speaking it would be

Considering the game sold many copies, and spurned a lot of good will, I would say it was a good concept in the context of what was advertised. Yes, certainly the actual product was a dud, but the trailers, the hype, people liked what they saw.

All the pre-launch publicity can be viewed as a massive exercise in building hype without actually committing to much at all. The language used irks me a lot as well, as it's bordering schizophrenia, but that's probably the point of it; they don't want to commit to anything, but make people think that's what they're getting. A case in point was the commonly asked question of whether you will see some other player... The answer was always that the universe is so large that statistically speaking it would be almost zero, but never gave the answer of 'no' because that wasn't implemented in the game.

Unfortunately no man's sky is a game which had a reasonably good concept, but it was then taken to a completely absurd level of marketing and spin. I just wonder how much of these problems are due to the forced hand of publishers who want their ROI, and how much was just incompetence from Hello Games?

Almost zero is not zero. It therefore implies that it is possible, even if its completely unlikely. However, without multiplayer support, the probability was exactly zero. So therefore they did lie and I have heard, from a coworker who bought the game, that there are several state attorney generals who are investigating the release of the game. I've also heard that the company basically vanished into thin air over night, so I am actually quite surprised to see there was an update.

Okay so normally we joke about a low number of users when talking about Windows phones, or BeOS users. But really Steam lists 400 active users last week.

The game launched with some 220k active users which within a month was reduced to less than 10k. The game is dead. The it is truly amazing that Hello Games haven't abandoned it completely. They are literally now adding features to a game that pretty much no one plays and that has gone down as one of the (if not *the*) biggest disappointment in video game history since the release of Duke Nukem Forever, and the latter had no where near the hype surrounding it.

This is a chill type game. I'm impressed and now it just got better with base building. Then again I started on Atari 2600 & pong - so maybe I appreciate it more.

My first game system was a Coleco Telstar. I still expect developers to make good on their promises, more or less. I'm not shocked when claims are slightly exaggerated. Entirely invented ones are not acceptable.

"A chill type game" in an "infinite generated universe" was exactly what I was looking for in NMS - and was sorely disappointed when it turned out to be nothing more than poorly designed grind game, with the procedural generation just being randomly pieced together premade assets.

It seems neat until you wear through the veneer, and then it's... oh, this thing is just plywood held together with duct tape

Yep, I agree. It's actually a really good game to chill out and spend an hour or so playing. If you spend too much time in it at once, it does wear thin, but an hour here and there is great pacing for the game.

I've already got my money's worth out of the game, so these updates are just a bonus. Also, reading all the angst, from people decrying HG for their lies, is pretty amusing. I guess more people have now learned that even developers don't fully know how their game will eventually turn out. Never s

I spent many hours in NMS. I won't say it's "great", but I won't say it's horrible either. It does not appear to be what was advertised, but it is what I expected. (a space based exploration game). I spent about 100 hours in the game - plenty of value for my $60. And I usually play off-line so my game time is not part of the "steam" counts. I fired up the game for the first time last night in two months to checkout what the new update did. Deleted my saved games and began a survival mode. Much harde

I wouldn't compare it to DNF. DNF is it's own thing. In the case of DNF it was in various states of vapourware for more than a decade. I don't think people were "disappointed" when it release as that would suggest the users were *surprised*, which I don't think anyone was that it was a steaming POS. Also DNF was a sequel.

The biggest disappointment for an initial release I would say was Masters of Orion 3, as expectations were so high, and the delivered product so missed the mark. However again, it was a seq

Probably the best comparison was Mass Effect 3, and it's stupid ending

Not even close. ME3 may have not had the decision tree style ending everyone was hoping for but the entire series was largely driven by choices that ultimately produced an incredibly solid game. A disappointment in the ending is just that, it doesn't change how awesomely fun the game is on the way. Although one could make comparisons to what's at the centre of the galaxy in No Man's Sky (spoiler: FUCK ALL), but at least it wasn't an incredibly stupid grindfest to get to it.

Agreed. I really enjoyed ME3 even if the end was disappointing. In fact I am looking forward to ME4 (which I just saw a bunch of trailers for)! That said, I hope they take a lesson from all the negative PR they got over the BS ending and really do an even better job this time around!

I mention MOO3 as it was what prompted me not to pre-order or early adopt games anymore. I was really interested in No Man's Sky, and was very tempted. In the end I was like "nope, I'll wait and see how the reviews come out"...